Who Wants To Be A Superhero, Week Six, Season Two [Spoilers]

Didn't last season have only six episodes in total? This being episode six means that this season will have seven or eight, right?

This episode was the kid episode, the one that took the players to an elementary school. Last year they just had to win the kids over; this year they had to work with the kids to solve a code. And working with the kids turned out to be the important part of the challenge, which became a problem for Parthenon later in the show.

This episode also featured "evil Stan," a cute nod to a theme we've seen many, many times in comics. Evil Stan directed the heroes to perform tasks that ranged from nonsensical to potentially dangerous. Presumably the test was to see at what point the heroes would realize they were being asked to do unheroic things and say "no." But none did, and honestly this wasn't at all surprising because Stan is always asking them to do things that don't necessarily make a lot of sense at the time. Second-guessing him generally leads to trouble. So if they all failed this one, well, duh.

As for the elimination, I was a surprised (and a little disappointed) to see Parthenon go. He did have problems this episode, but he's made an excellent showing in the challenges throughout the rest of the show, so eliminating him due to what happened in this one episode seemed a little unbalanced to me (I thought that performance as a whole was what counted, although since that would mean that the later in the season, the less important any one task would be, so perhaps I'm wrong there?). As far as challenge performance goes, I'd have expected Hygena to go, although I quite like her in other respects. It's certainly further evidence of the subjectivity of the decisions. I'm not totally complaining about the subjectivity, mind--I think it makes an interesting dynamic, that whole "What will Stan like today?" thing. I imagine it was nerve-wracking for the contestants, being constantly presented with conflicting options, any of which could have been the "right" thing to do but having no way to know which Stan will value most for that particular challenge.

One thing that did occur to me--and I'm not saying anything about Stan's choices, just that it's interesting to note this--is that both last season and this season, the last remaining woman in the competition was someone whose hero "theme" had to do with a traditionally feminine role. Fat Momma, of course, has a parental focus (although she's not the only contestant who has had the care and safety of children as a specific concern), and Hygena has a housecleaning focus. Not that there's anything wrong with being a mother or a homemaker (I'm the last person to imply that!), and I liked both characters, just that it's interesting that that's who made the final cut both years.